The excuse to make banana ice cream is one of the few good things about bananas getting on the old side. You can make it just fine with fresh banana, but old ones need to get used up. Something that tastes like ice cream, yet is almost entirely made of fruit makes a pretty amazing treat. After looking in the fridge, I decided that this batch of bananas would be made into raspberry chocolate chip banana ice cream.

I have been fortunate enough lately to find fresh raspberries at my local dollar store. Those little containers that cost a couple bucks most of the time at the regular grocery store are only $1 at the dollar store. The one by me carries lots of produce, and it’s usually a better price than what you’d pay at the grocery store. Most of the time it’s plenty fresh. I’ve seen the occasional exception, sadly, but in general, they’re very good about their produce.

I love getting berries there. My kids gobble them up. It’s nice being able to give them a healthy treat at a good price.

We get some unusual berries there too. We tried kiwiberries from there one time. They do in fact look like miniature kiwifruits without the fuzz. They’re a little more tart too. Overall, I’ll stick with regular kiwifruits because you get more for your money.

Back to the raspberry chocolate chip banana ice cream.

We’ve had a really warm fall, and my youngest was complaining that she wanted ice cream. I wasn’t in the mood to go to the store, but we had four bananas sitting out and getting on the old side. One of me, three kids… sounded about right.

We sliced up the bananas and spread them out on the cutting board to go into the freezer. Took them out a couple hours later and threw them into my Vitamix.

Now, I’ve made banana ice cream in my dinky food processor before, and I have to say that I like that method better overall. I used my Vitamix this time because my food processor is really, really small, and can only work on about a banana at a time. That’s no good when you have kids wanting their treats now. So I used the Vitamix.

I prefer the food processor because it’s easier to pulse it. Banana ice cream is hard on a blender. You can do it, but you have to make sure to pulse the blender. Turning the Vitamix on and off isn’t that much harder than pulsing a blender, but it’s just a little annoying to me. It was also a lot harder to get all the bananas into the mix. I think that’s a volume problem.

The blended bananas have to be knocked down a lot when you’re mixing a bunch of them. By the time I was ready to add in the raspberries, I decided to finish the job off by hand.

This turned out to be a really good idea. I put the banana ice cream into a plastic container, then added the fresh raspberries and chocolate chips. No need to freeze the raspberries first – I wanted them to break up just a little.

This worked out beautifully. The raspberries broke up just enough and froze as I mixed. The chocolate chips behaved like chocolate chips. The mix looked beautiful.

The real test, of course, was the kids. Me too, I suppose, but kids can be picky.

My older two loved the ice cream. They want to make this again and again.

My youngest, the one who was begging for ice cream? Hated it. She loves bananas. She loves raspberries. She loves chocolate. And she’s just contrary enough to not like the combination. That’s kids for you. Raspberry chocolate chip banana ice cream was decidedly not to her taste. She took a few bites, then gave the rest to her sister.

I’ll gladly make this again sometime regardless of one child’s opinion. I thought it was wonderful.

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